


to want.

by youlovelythief



Category: Bleach
Genre: Adultery, F/M, Mild Sexual Content, Oops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-28
Updated: 2016-12-28
Packaged: 2018-09-12 18:49:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9085270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/youlovelythief/pseuds/youlovelythief
Summary: Ichigo leaves. Uryuu doesn't. / post-686





	

Uryuu Ishida has not allowed himself to want many things.

He’s wanted stability, sure, he’s wanted to come home every night to a warm bed, a cup of tea. He’s wanted strength so badly he’s nearly died a handful of times for the opportunity, he wears his silver bow around his wrist even now. He’s wanted to simply be content and quiet for his whole life, and he had thought that the years after the Last Quincy War would be filled with that for him.

He’s also, ever since he met her, wanted Orihime Inoue to be happy.

After twenty-seven years on this Earth and a few years spent elsewhere, Uryuu thought he could confidently say he had at least one of these. Orihime Inoue became Orihime Kurosaki on a warm spring day after a long rainfall the night before, walking down the aisle in a gown that Uryuu himself had sewn the embroidery into. She’d also had him attach more fabric to the front of the skirt as her belly grew, so that her three-month bump is barely detectable in the portrait hanging next to the doorway of the Kurosaki Clinic. The picture is the starting point for a trail of beaming brown-eyed, orange-haired faces throughout the house, most of them centering around Kazui. Their friends are scattered throughout too—Arisawa-san with Ichigo in a headlock, Chad holding baby Kazui, Karin and Yuzu graduating high school. There’s even one or two of Uryuu around there, when they’d all come to see him graduate from medical school.

There aren’t many, though. Especially not from high school, besides year book photos and the occasional low-resolution, pre-smartphone picture that Orihime had printed out. She hadn’t had a camera until Ichigo’s father had bought her one for the wedding, and to this day she laments not having one back then.

Uryuu, for the most part, doesn’t think it matters. The point is she’s happy now.

Arisawa-san manages to shatter the entire illusion with a single phone call.

 _What the fuck is he doing, Ishida, he just up and fucking_ leaves? _He thinks he can go off to God-fucking-knows-where with just a note, just a note to his goddamn wife and child, get him back, Ishida, I know you know where he is, go get him, Orihime’s miserable—_

Except he doesn’t.

Except he doesn’t, because he knows where he is and who he’s with and what he’s probably doing at this very moment, and quite frankly, Uryuu can’t give a damn.

For once, Uryuu Ishida does the one thing he’s ever really wanted to do, the one thing he should have done ten years ago:

Mouths, hands, hips colliding on the kitchen counter top, skirt bunched up to her waist, buttons ripped from his shirt.

“Ishida-kun,” she says, his name pouring fast and scalding hot when their mouths come apart, “Ishida-kun, we _can’t_ , I, I’m— _mmm—“_ She shivers and clutches his arm as his knuckle grinds against something warm and sensitive through her underwear.

He pulls away from the base of her throat to look her in the eye—both of their chests heaving, eyes hooded, a sheen of sweat.

“He’s an idiot,” Uryuu says, and _God_ , it felt right to say that to her, to finally let it out into the air. “He’s a complete moron, Inoue-san—“ and their lips find each other again, and it seems both of them have all the reason they need.

 

* * *

 

“We could’ve been good people, Ishida-kun,” she whispers later, after.

 Sunlight falls over them on the kitchen floor, the tiles warm against her bare feet.

He presses his lips to her temple, swipes his thumb across her cheek.

“I know.”

* * *

 

They haven’t exactly grown up to be the people their high school selves wanted to be. All that fighting, all those wars—it took something from them. Uryuu thinks the Last War spun them off course, made them all stumble along the paths to being the heroes they had dreamed themselves to be. Knocked them down to where they were today: normal, everyday adults. It had shaken them, shaken the entire fabric of existence—had perhaps scared them out of becoming heroes.

Her long skirt shifts softly as she slides her leg up his absently, and he likes to think that this, at least, is something he can take back from that path.

Uryuu never wanted to be ‘good.’ He has always done what is right, what is just, what is _true._

This time, all he wants is her. Just her.


End file.
